- US regime expands list of countries whose citizens must pay up to $15,000 bonds to apply for visas
Source: Associated Press
“The Trump administration has added seven countries, including five in Africa, to the list of nations whose passport holders are required to post bonds of up to $15,000 to apply to enter the United States. Thirteen countries, all but two of them in Africa, are now on the list, which makes the process of obtaining a U.S. visa unaffordable for many. The State Department last week quietly added Bhutan, Botswana, the Central African Republic, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia and Turkmenistan to the list. Those designations took effect on Jan. 1, according to a notice posted on the travel.state.gov website. It’s the latest effort by the Trump administration to tighten requirements for entry to the U.S., including requiring citizens from all countries that require visas to sit for in-person interviews and disclose years of social media histories as well as detailed accounts of their and their families’ previous travel and living arrangements.” (01/05/26)
https://apnews.com/article/us-visa-restrictions-trump-bond-travel-7211e43ef4eb84144717c3331ab89e8e
- US CDC reduces number of recommended vaccines for children
Source: The Hill
“The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) is reducing the number of vaccines it recommends for children, officials said Monday, a major shift that officials say will bring the U.S. recommendations more similar to those of other developed countries. The move, which is effective immediately, fulfills a longtime goal of Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and other vaccine skeptics who have questioned the number and benefit of the vaccines children receive. The CDC will now recommend children receive 11 vaccines, rather than the current list of 17, putting it line with the much smaller country of Denmark.” [editor’s note: Right direction, for which RFK/MAHA deserve at least a golf clap – TLK] (01/05/26)
https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/5673251-cdc-reduces-childhood-vaccines
- Gmail to Discontinue POP3 Mail Fetching for External Email Accounts
Source: Cyber Security News
“Google has announced that Gmail will discontinue support for two key features regarding third-party email accounts. Starting in January 2026, the platform will drop support for ‘Gmailify’ and the widely utilized ‘Check mail from other accounts’ feature via POP3 fetching. For over a decade, power users have relied on Gmail not just as an email service, but as a central hub for managing diverse email identities. This upcoming update effectively marks the end of Gmail acting as a web-based email client for external POP3 accounts. The deprecation of Gmailify represents a loss of functionality for users who linked Yahoo, Outlook, or other IMAP accounts to get the ‘Google treatment.’ Gmailify bridged the gap between providers, applying Google’s advanced algorithms to third-party inboxes.” (01/05/26)
- You Think Our Country’s So Innocent?
Source: Notablog
by Chris Matthew Sciabarra“Back in July 2016, when I predicted that Donald Trump would win his first campaign for the White House, I wrote skeptically about the coming ‘Trump Revolution.’ I was encouraged by only one thing: That Trump might foster a less interventionist foreign policy than, say, Hillary Clinton. He was belatedly critical of the Iraq War and when questioned by Bill O’Reilly about how Russia had interfered in U.S. elections, he replied correctly: ‘You think our country’s so innocent?’ Indeed, the United States government has been responsible for toppling more governments abroad (both covertly and overtly) than perhaps any other government in the history of the world. Unfortunately, not even in his first term did Trump live up to the ‘promise’ of a revolution in foreign policy.” (01/04/26)
https://notablog.net/2026/01/04/you-think-our-countrys-so-innocent/
- Gentle Individualism, Rugged Communitarianism
Source: Underthrow
by Max Borders“Mindwar creates false binaries. I don’t know who coined the phrase ‘rugged individualism,’ but surely there is something gentle in respecting the person and property of every individual. No doubt, there is a ruggedness to making one’s way in the world without government goodies and nationalized industries, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Nowadays, the phrase is almost always used sardonically. I also don’t see how communitarianism ever got associated with what government authorities ought to do, but community is not something that state officials can compel.” (01/05/26)
https://underthrow.substack.com/p/gentle-individualism-rugged-communitarianism
- Trump’s Venezuelan Crony Capitalism
Source: Ludwig von Mises Institute
by Peter G Klein“Trump justifies his war on Venezuela by saying that ‘they’ stole ‘our’ oil. Unpacking this claim gives us insight into Trump’s version of crony capitalism – a system of private ownership in which the state intervenes to promote the interests of politically connected firms. … A common feature of crony capitalism is the subsidization of downside loss – owners keep the profits, but losses are passed onto the taxpayer. That is exactly what Trump and his allies propose here.” (01/05/26)
https://mises.org/power-market/trumps-venezuelan-crony-capitalism
- Trump’s health issue is growing. Maybe it’s JD Vance time.
Source: USA Today
by Rex Huppke“Nothing snuffs out questions about a near-octogenarian president’s health quite like that president repeatedly bragging about passing a dementia test and telling the world he ignores his doctors and doesn’t exercise. … we have a commander in chief who’s pushing 80, doesn’t sleep much and bruises ‒ if you believe the White House’s excuses ‒ when someone shakes his hand. … If Trump administration officials were smart ‒ they’re not ‒ they would be putting Vice President JD Vance front and center more often to at least reassure Americans that Trump has a competent person behind him. The fact that they’re not doing this is either a testament to Trump’s ego ‒ which bruises more easily than his flesh ‒ or an indictment of Vance’s competence and likability, or both.” (01/05/26)
- Venezuela Might Be Where Trump’s Luck Runs Out
Source: Foreign Policy
by Emma Ashford“The president has been lucky. His strikes in Iran did not lead to substantial escalation, and for the moment, the seizure of Maduro does not appear to have thrown Venezuela into chaos. But that does not mean the president’s ability to avoid the consequences of future strikes of this kind — in Mexico, say, or Greenland — couldn’t easily turn into blowback against the United States. And the more that Trump engages in these displays of U.S. force, the more likely it is that one of them will go catastrophically wrong.” (01/05/26)
- The Warmth of Collectivism is the Cold Logic of Ruin
Source: Town Hall
by Elicia Brand“When New York’s new mayor vowed to replace rugged individualism with collectivism, he echoed an ideology history has already tested, and buried. Ayn Rand warned us what happens when societies punish excellence. In 2026, New York chose to learn the lesson anyway. On January 1, 2026, in his inaugural address as Mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani stated it plainly: ‘We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.’ This was not a flourish or a metaphor gone astray. It was a governing declaration, delivered from the seat of American commerce and offered as the philosophical blueprint for how the nation’s largest city would now be run … Socialist (cough, cough—Communist). History has heard this language before, and it has always ended the same way.” (01/05/25)
- Fed Independence?
Source: Foundation for Economic Education
by Walter Block“Ideally, there should be no such thing as the Federal Reserve System. The Fed should not have been created in 1913, and should be disbanded right now. End the Fed! This organization is nothing more and nothing less than a central planning bureau for interest rates, employment, and inflation (of late, it has expanded its mandate to include climate change and social equity issues as well). Evidently, we have not yet fully incorporated the lessons about central planning we should have learned as a society from the examples of East and West Germany, North and South Korea. These came as close to a controlled experiment as we are ever likely to find in all of economics, and yet we still continue our merry way in the direction of central planning.” (01/05/26)
- Venezuela’s New President Is No Moderate
Source: Persuasion
by Quico Toro“About a month ago, as America’s military presence in the Caribbean ramped up, The New York Times ran a feature on the figures that could imaginably step into the presidency in Nicolás Maduro’s absence. One heading was titled ‘The Moderate: Delcy Rodríguez, Vice President.’ … To Venezuelans who had spent over a decade seeing in her one of Nicolás Maduro’s most ardent and uncompromising acolytes, calling her a ‘moderate’ is an outrage. Here’s a woman who has held all of the most important offices of state — oil minister, minister of foreign affairs, president of the constituent assembly, vice president — and has never allowed any hint of sunlight to appear between her and Maduro.” (01/05/26)
https://www.persuasion.community/p/what-you-need-to-know-about-venezuelas
- The Empire Stole Venezuela
Source: Caitlin Johnstone, Rogue Journalist
by Caitlin Johnstone“It’s not just that they stole Venezuela’s president in order to steal its oil, it’s that they’re working to steal the whole damn country. To steal its sovereignty. Its right to conduct its own affairs on its own terms as an independent nation. Dopey right wingers who learned the phrase ‘Monroe Doctrine’ like ten seconds ago have been mindlessly parroting those words all day to defend Trump’s Venezuela assault, and what’s grating about it is they actually think they’re talking about a real thing. They’re like, ‘No no it was totally legit, see there’s this thing called the Monroe Doctrine which says we get to control everything that happens in the western hemisphere and treat half the planet like it’s our own personal property.'” (01/05/25)
https://caitlinjohnstone.com.au/2026/01/05/new-issue-of-johnstone-the-empire-stole-venezuela/
- Verbal Self-Defense #1
Source: The Findings Substack
by Paul Rosenberg“Actual street fights are, thankfully, rather rare in the world. Verbal street fights, sadly, are common. In most cases these fights spring out of an amoral need to preserve status. If you begin to question or diminish ideas which someone feels tied to – from which they gain standing in one way or another – they’re likely to dislike you and/or to verbally attack you. All of us with non-standard opinions have experienced this. So, since non-standard opinions are the path to progress, it’s important that we learn how to deal with these attacks. This will be the first of several posts on this subject, which I sometimes think of as Verbal Judo.” (01/05/26)
- Reason Roundtable, 12/05/26
Source: Reason
“What Does It Mean To ‘Run’ Venezuela?” (01/05/26)
https://reason.com/podcast/2026/01/05/what-does-it-mean-to-run-venezuela/
- The Mona Charen Show, 01/05/26
Source: The Bulwark
“Stability Was America’s Secret Weapon (w/ Catherine Rampell).” (01/05/26)
- Finding Freedom, 01/05/26
Source: Lions of Liberty
“Power, Justice and the Decline of Trust with Brian O’Leary.” (01/05/26)
https://www.lionsofliberty.com/episodes/ff-power-justice-and-the-decline-of-trust-with-brian-oleary